Some powerful evidence on the impact of opportunity comes from Raj Chetty—the economist behind the research we covered earlier linking the character skills we learn in kindergarten to our future success. Chetty and his colleagues were interested in how opportunity shapes who ends up innovating. They reasoned that some kids would grow up in environments that gave them special access to resources. When they linked federal income tax returns with patent records for more than a million Americans, they found an alarming result. People raised in the top 1 percent of family income were ten times more
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